The Homeric Hymns

HYMN TO DEMETER

THE ALLEGED EGYPTIAN ORIGINS

In what has been said as to the Greek Mysteries, I have regarded them as of native origin. I have exhibited rites of analogous kinds in the germ, as it were, among savage and barbaric communities. In Peru, under the Incas, we actually find Mama and Cora (Demeter and Korê) as Goddesses of the maize (Acosta), and for rites of sympathetic magic connected with the production of fertile harvests (as in the Thesmophoria at Athens) it is enough to refer to the vast collection in Mr. Frazer’s “Golden Bough.” I have also indicated the closest of all known parallels to the Eleusinian in a medicine-dance and legend of the Pawnees. For other savage Mysteries in which a moral element occurs, I have quoted Australian and African examples. Thence I have inferred that the early Greeks might, and probably did, evolve their multiform mystic rites out of germs of such things inherited from their own prehistoric ancestors. No process, on the other hand, of borrowing from Greece can conceivably account for the Pawnee and Peruvian rites, so closely analogous to those of Hellas. Therefore I see no reason why, if Egypt, for instance, presents parallels to the Eleusinia, we should suppose that the prehistoric Greeks borrowed the Eleusinia from Egypt. These things can grow up, autochthonous and underived, out of the soil of human nature anywhere, granting certain social conditions. Monsieur Foucart, however, has lately argued in favour of an Egyptian origin of the Eleusinia. 39

The Greeks naturally identified Demeter and Dionysus with Isis and Osiris. There were analogies in the figures and the legends, and that was enough. So, had the Greeks visited America, they would have recognised Demeter in the Pawnee Earth Mother, and Persephone or Eubouleus in Chibiabos. To account for the similarities they would probably have invented a fable of Pawnee visitors to Greece, or of Greek missionaries among the Pawnees. So they were apt to form a theory of an Egyptian origin of Dionysus and Demeter.

M. Foucart, however, argues that agriculture, corn-growing at least, came into Greece at one stride, barley and wheat not being indigenous in a wild state. The Greeks, however, may have brought grain in their original national migration (the Greek words for grain and ploughing are common to other families of Aryan speech) or obtained it from Phœnician settlements. Demeter, however, in M. Foucart’s theory, would be the Goddess of the foreigners who carried the grain first to Hellas. Now both the Homeric epics and the Egyptian monuments show us Egypt and Greece in contact in the Greek prehistoric period. But it does not exactly follow that the prehistoric Greeks would adopt Egyptian gods; or that the Thesmophoria, an Athenian harvest-rite of Demeter, was founded by colonists from Egypt, answering to the daughters of Danaus. 40 Egyptians certainly did not introduce the similar rite among the Khonds, or the Incas. The rites could grow up without importation, as the result of the similarities of primitive fancy everywhere. If Isis is Lady of the Grain in Egypt, so is Mama in Peru, and Demeter need no more have been imported from Egypt than Mama. If Osiris taught the arts of life and the laws of society in Egypt, so did Daramulun in Australia, and Yehl in British Columbia. All the gods and culture heroes everywhere play this rôle– in regions where importation of the idea from Egypt is utterly out of the question. Even in minute details, legends recur everywhere; the phallus of a mutilated Australian being of the fabulous “Alcheringa time,” is hunted for by his wives; exactly as Isis wanders in search of the phallus of the mutilated Osiris. 41 Is anything in the Demeter legend so like the Isis legend as this Australian coincidence? Yet the Arunta did not borrow it from Egypt. 42 The mere fact, again, that there were Mysteries both in Egypt and Greece proves nothing. There is a river in Monmouth, and a river in Macedon; there are Mysteries in almost all religions.

Again, it is argued, the Gods of the Mysteries in Egypt and Greece had secret names, only revealed to the initiated. So, too, in Australia, women (never initiated) and boys before initiation, know Daramulun only as Papang (Father). 43 The uninitiated among the Kurnai do not know the sacred name, Mungan-ngaur. 44 The Australian did not borrow this secrecy from Egypt. Everywhere a mystery is kept up about proper names. M. Foucart seems to think that what is practically universal, a taboo on names, can only have reached Greece by transplantation from Egypt. 45 To the anthropologist it seems that scholars, in ignoring the universal ideas of the lower races, run the risk of venturing on theories at once superficial and untenable.

M. Foucart has another argument, which does not seem more convincing, though it probably lights up the humorous or indecent side of the Eleusinia. Isocrates speaks of “good offices” rendered to Demeter by “our ancestors,” which “can only be told to the initiate.” 46 Now these cannot be the kindly deeds reported in the Hymn, for these were publicly proclaimed. What, then, were the secret good offices? In one version of the legend the hosts of Demeter were not Celeus and Metaneira, but Dusaules and Baubo. The part of Baubo was to relieve the gloom of the Goddess, not by the harmless pleasantries of Iambê, in the Hymn, but by obscene gestures. The Christian Fathers, Clemens of Alexandria at least, make this a part of their attack on the Mysteries; but it may be said that they were prejudiced or misinformed. 47 But, says M. Foucart, an inscription has been found in Paros, wherein there is a dedication to Hera, Demeter Thesmophoros, Korê, and Babo, or Baubo. Again, two authors of the fourth century, Palæphatus and Asclepiades, cite the Dusaules and Baubo legend. 48

Now the indecent gesture of Baubo was part of the comic or obscene folk-lore of contempt in Egypt, and so M. Foucart thinks that it was borrowed from Egypt with the Demeter legend. 49 Can Isocrates have referred to this good office? – the amusing of Demeter by an obscene gesture? If he did, such gestures as Baubo’s are as widely diffused as any other piece of folk-lore. In the centre of the Australian desert Mr. Carnegie saw a native make a derisive gesture which he thought had only been known to English schoolboys. 50 Again, indecent pantomimic dances, said to be intended to act as “object lessons” in things not to be done, are common in Australian Mysteries. Further, we do not know Baubo, or a counterpart of her, in the ritual of Isis, and the clay figurines of such a figure, in Egypt, are of the Greek, the Ptolemaic period. Thus the evidence comes to this: an indecent gesture of contempt, known in Egypt, is, at Eleusis, attributed to Baubo. This does not prove that Baubo was originally Egyptian. 51 Certain traditions make Demeter the mistress of Celeus. 52 Traces of a “mystic marriage,” which also occur, are not necessarily Egyptian: the idea and rite are common.

There remains the question of the sacred objects displayed (possibly statues, probably very ancient “medicine” things, as among the Pawnees) and sacred words spoken. These are said by many authors to confirm the initiate in their security of hope as to a future life. Now similar instruction, as to the details of the soul’s voyage, the dangers to avoid, the precautions to be taken, notoriously occur in the Egyptian “Book of the Dead.” But very similar fancies are reported from the Ojibbeways (Kohl), the Polynesians and Maoris (Taylor, Turner, Gill, Thomson), the early peoples of Virginia, 53 the modern Arapaho and Sioux of the Ghost Dance rite, the Aztecs, and so forth. In all countries these details are said to have been revealed by men or women who died, but did not (like Persephone) taste the food of the dead; and so were enabled to return to earth. The initiate, at Eleusis, were guided along a theatrically arranged pathway of the dead, into a theatrical Elysium. 54 Now as such ideas as these occur among races utterly removed from contact with Egypt, as they are part of the European folk-lore of the visits of mortals to fairyland (in which it is fatal to taste fairy food), I do not see that Eleusis need have borrowed such common elements of early belief from the Egyptians in the seventh century B.C. 55 One might as well attribute to Egypt the Finnish legend of the descent of Wainamoinen into Tuonela; or the experience of the aunt of Montezuma just before the arrival of Cortès; or the expedition to fairyland of Thomas the Rhymer. It is not pretended by M. Foucart that the details of the “Book of the Dead” were copied in Greek ritual; and the general idea of a river to cross, of dangerous monsters to avoid, of perils to encounter, of precautions to be taken by the wandering soul, is nearly universal, where it must be unborrowed from Egypt, in Polynesian and Red Indian belief. As at Eleusis, in these remote tribes formulas of a preservative character are inculcated.

The “Book of the Dead” was a guidebook of the itinerary of Egyptian souls. Very probably similar instruction was given to the initiate at Eleusis. But the Fijians also have a regular theory of what is to be done and avoided on “The Path of the Shades.” The shade is ferried by Ceba (Charon) over Wainiyalo (Lethe); he reaches the mystic pandanus tree (here occurs a rite); he meets, and dodges, Drodroyalo and the two devouring Goddesses; he comes to a spring, and drinks, and forgets sorrow at Wai-na-dula, the “Water of Solace.” After half-a-dozen other probations and terrors, he reaches the Gods, “the dancing-ground and the white quicksand; and then the young Gods dance before them and sing… ” 56

Now turn to Plutarch. 57 Plutarch compares the soul’s mortal experience with that of the initiate in the Mysteries. “There are wanderings, darkness, fear, trembling, shuddering, horror, then a marvellous light: pure places and meadows, dances, songs, and holy apparitions.” Plutarch might be summarising the Fijian belief. Again, take the mystic golden scroll, found in a Greek grave at Petilia. It describes in hexameters the Path of the Shade: the spring and the white cypress on the left: “Do not approach it. Go to the other stream from the Lake of Memory; tell the Guardians that you are the child of Earth and of the starry sky, but that yours is a heavenly lineage; and they will give you to drink of that water, and you shall reign with the other heroes.”

Tree, and spring, and peaceful place with dance, song, and divine apparitions, all are Fijian, all are Greek, yet nothing is borrowed by Fiji from Greece. Many other Greek inscriptions cited by M. Foucart attest similar beliefs. Very probably such precepts as those of the Petilia scroll were among the secret instructions of Eleusis. But they are not so much Egyptian as human. Chibiabos is assuredly not borrowed from Osiris, nor the Fijian faith from the “Book of the Dead.” “Sacred things,” not to be shown to man, still less to woman, date from the “medicine bag” of the Red Indian, the mystic tribal bundles of the Pawnees, and the churinga, and bark “native portmanteaux,” of which Mr. Carnegie brought several from the Australian desert.

For all Greek Mysteries a satisfactory savage analogy can be found. These spring straight from human nature: from the desire to place customs, and duties, and taboos under divine protection; from the need of strengthening them, and the influence of the elders, by mystic sanctions; from the need of fortifying and trying the young by probations of strength, secrecy, and fortitude; from the magical expulsion of hostile influences; from the sympathetic magic of early agriculture; from study of the processes of nature regarded as personal; and from guesses, surmises, visions, and dreams as to the fortunes of the wandering soul on its way to its final home. I have shown all these things to be human, universal, not sprung from one race in one region. Greek Mysteries are based on all these natural early conceptions of life and death. The early Greeks, like other races, entertained these primitive, or very archaic ideas. Greece had no need to borrow from Egypt; and, though Egypt was within reach, Greece probably developed freely her original stock of ideas in her own fashion, just as did the Incas, Aztecs, Australians, Ojibbeways, and the other remote peoples whom I have selected. The argument of M. Foucart, I think, is only good as long as we are ignorant of the universally diffused forms of religious belief which correspond to the creeds of Eleusis or of Egypt. In the Greek Mysteries we have the Greek guise, – solemn, wistful, hopeful, holy, and pure, yet not uncontaminated with archaic buffoonery, – of notions and rites, hopes and fears, common to all mankind. There is no other secret.

The same arguments as I have advanced against Greek borrowing from Egypt, apply to Greek borrowing from Asia. Mr. Ramsay, following Mr. Robertson Smith, suggests that Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, may be “the old Semitic Al-lat.” 58 Then we have Leto and Artemis, as the Mother and the Maid (Korê) with their mystery play. “Clement describes them” (the details) as “Eleusinian, for they had spread to Eleusis as the rites of Demeter and Korê crossing from Asia to Crete, and from Crete to the European peninsula.” The ritual “remained everywhere fundamentally the same.” Obviously if the Eleusinian Mysteries are of Phrygian origin (Ramsay), they cannot also be of Egyptian origin (Foucart). In truth they are no more specially of Phrygian or Egyptian than of Pawnee or Peruvian origin. Mankind can and does evolve such ideas and rites in any region of the world. 59

CONCLUSION

“What has all this farrago about savages to do with Dionysus?” I conceive some scholar, or literary critic asking, if such an one looks into this book. Certainly it would have been easier for me to abound in æsthetic criticism of the Hymns, and on the aspect of Greek literary art which they illustrate. But the Hymns, if read even through the pale medium of a translation, speak for themselves. Their beauties and defects as poetry are patent: patent, too, are the charm and geniality of the national character which they express. The glad Ionian gatherings; the archaic humour; the delight in life, and love, and nature; the pious domesticities of the sacred Hearth; the peopling of woods, hills, and streams with exquisite fairy forms; all these make the poetic delight of the Hymns. But all these need no pointing out to any reader. The poets can speak for themselves.

On the other hand the confusions of sacred and profane; the origins of the Mysteries; the beginnings of the Gods in a mental condition long left behind by Greece when the Hymns were composed; all these matters need elucidation. I have tried to elucidate them as results of evolution from the remote prehistoric past of Greece, which, as it seems, must in many points have been identical with the historic present of the lowest contemporary races. In the same way, if dealing with ornament, I would derive the spirals, volutes, and concentric circles of Mycenæan gold work, from the identical motives, on the oldest incised rocks and kists of our Islands, of North and South America, and of the tribes of Central Australia, recently described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, and Mr. Carnegie. The material of the Mycenæan artist may be gold, his work may be elegant and firm, but he traces the selfsame ornament as the naked Arunta, with feebler hand, paints on sacred rocks or on the bodies of his tribesmen. What is true of ornament is true of myth, rite, and belief. Greece only offers a gracious modification of the beliefs, rites, and myths of the races who now are “nearest the beginning,” however remote from that unknown beginning they may be. To understand this is to come closer to a true conception of the evolution of Greek faith and art than we can reach by any other path. Yet to insist on this is not to ignore the unmeasured advance of the Greeks in development of society and art. On that head the Hymns, like all Greek poetry, bear their own free testimony. But, none the less, Greek religion and myth present features repellent to us, which derive their origin, not from savagery, but from the more crude horrors of the lower and higher barbarisms.

Greek religion, Greek myth, are vast conglomerates. We find a savage origin for Apollo, and savage origins for many of the Mysteries. But the cruelty of savage initiations has been purified away. On the other hand, we find a barbaric origin for departmental gods, such as Aphrodite, and for Greek human sacrifices, unknown to the lowest savagery. From savagery Zeus is probably derived; from savagery come the germs of the legends of divine amours in animal forms. But from barbarism arises the sympathetic magic of agriculture, which the lowest races do not practise. From the barbaric condition, not from savagery, comes Greek hero-worship, for the lowest races do not worship ancestral spirits. Such is the medley of prehistoric ideas in Greece, while the charm and poetry of the Hymns are due mainly to the unique genius of the fully developed Hellenic race. The combination of good and bad, of ancestral rites and ideas, of native taste, of philosophical refinement on inherited theology, could not last; the elements were too discordant. And yet it could not pass naturally away. The Greece of A.D. 300

“Wandered between two worlds, one dead,The other powerless to be born,”

without external assistance. That help was brought by the Christian creed, and, officially, Gods, rites, and myths vanished, while, unofficially, they partially endure, even to this day, in Romaic folk-lore.

HOMERIC HYMNS

HYMN TO APOLLO

Mindful, ever mindful, will I be of Apollo the Far-darter. Before him, as he fares through the hall of Zeus, the Gods tremble, yea, rise up all from their thrones as he draws near with his shining bended bow. But Leto alone abides by Zeus, the Lord of Lightning, till Apollo hath slackened his bow and closed his quiver. Then, taking with her hands from his mighty shoulders the bow and quiver, she hangs them against the pillar beside his father’s seat from a pin of gold, and leads him to his place and seats him there, while the father welcomes his dear son, giving him nectar in a golden cup; then do the other Gods welcome him; then they make him sit, and Lady Leto rejoices, in that she bore the Lord of the Bow, her mighty son.

[Hail! O blessed Leto; mother of glorious children, Prince Apollo and Artemis the Archer; her in Ortygia, him in rocky Delos didst thou bear, couching against the long sweep of the Cynthian Hill, beside a palm tree, by the streams of Inopus.]

How shall I hymn thee aright, howbeit thou art, in sooth, not hard to hymn? 60 for to thee, Phœbus, everywhere have fallen all the ranges of song, both on the mainland, nurse of young kine, and among the isles; to thee all the cliffs are dear, and the steep mountain crests and rivers running onward to the salt sea, and beaches sloping to the foam, and havens of the deep? Shall I tell how Leto bore thee first, a delight of men, couched by the Cynthian Hill in the rocky island, in sea-girt Delos – on either hand the black wave drives landward at the word of the shrill winds – whence arising thou art Lord over all mortals?

Among them that dwell in Crete, and the people of Athens, and isle Ægina, and Eubœa famed for fleets, and Ægæ and Peiresiæ, and Peparethus by the sea-strand, and Thracian Athos, and the tall crests of Pelion, and Thracian Samos, and the shadowy mountains of Ida, Scyros, and Phocæa, and the mountain wall of Aigocane, and stablished Imbros, and inhospitable Lemnos, and goodly Lesbos, the seat of Makar son of Æolus, and Chios, brightest of all islands of the deep, and craggy Mimas, and the steep crests of Mykale, and gleaming Claros, and the high hills of Æsageê, and watery Samos, and tall ridges of Mycale, and Miletus, and Cos, a city of Meropian men, and steep Cnidos, and windy Carpathus, Naxos and Paros, and rocky Rheneia – so far in travail with the Archer God went Leto, seeking if perchance any land would build a house for her son.

But the lands trembled sore, and were adread, and none, nay not the richest, dared to welcome Phœbus, not till Lady Leto set foot on Delos, and speaking winged words besought her:

“Delos, would that thou wert minded to be the seat of my Son, Phœbus Apollo, and to let build him therein a rich temple! No other God will touch thee, nor none will honour thee, for methinks thou art not to be well seen in cattle or in sheep, in fruit or grain, nor wilt thou grow plants unnumbered. But wert thou to possess a temple of Apollo the Far-darter; then would all men bring thee hecatombs, gathering to thee, and ever wilt thou have savour of sacrifice.. from others’ hands, albeit thy soil is poor.”

Thus spoke she, and Delos was glad and answered her saying:

“Leto, daughter most renowned of mighty Cœus, right gladly would I welcome the birth of the Archer Prince, for verily of me there goes an evil report among men, and thus would I wax mightiest of renown. But at this Word, Leto, I tremble, nor will I hide it from thee, for the saying is that Apollo will be mighty of mood, and mightily will lord it over mortals and immortals far and wide over the earth, the grain-giver. Therefore, I deeply dread in heart and soul lest, when first he looks upon the sunlight, he disdain my island, for rocky of soil am I, and spurn me with his feet and drive me down in the gulfs of the salt sea. Then should a great sea-wave wash mightily above my head for ever, but he will fare to another land, which so pleases him, to fashion him a temple and groves of trees. But in me would many-footed sea-beasts and black seals make their chambers securely, no men dwelling by me. Nay, still, if thou hast the heart, Goddess, to swear a great oath that here first he will build a beautiful temple, to be the shrine oracular of men – thereafter among all men let him raise him shrines, since his renown shall be the widest.”

So spake she, but Leto swore the great oath of the Gods:

“Bear witness, Earth, and the wide heaven above, and dropping water of Styx – the greatest oath and the most dread among the blessed Gods – that verily here shall ever be the fragrant altar and the portion of Apollo, and thee will he honour above all.”

When she had sworn and done that oath, then Delos was glad in the birth of the Archer Prince. But Leto, for nine days and nine nights continually was pierced with pangs of child-birth beyond all hope. With her were all the Goddesses, the goodliest, Dione and Rheia, and Ichnæan Themis, and Amphitrite of the moaning sea, and the other deathless ones – save white-armed Hera. Alone she wotted not of it, Eilithyia, the helper in difficult travail. For she sat on the crest of Olympus beneath the golden clouds, by the wile of white-armed Hera, who held her afar in jealous grudge, because even then fair-tressed Leto was about bearing her strong and noble son.

But the Goddesses sent forth Iris from the fair-stablished isle, to bring Eilithyia, promising her a great necklet, golden with amber studs, nine cubits long. Iris they bade to call Eilithyia apart from white-armed Hera, lest even then the words of Hera might turn her from her going. But wind-footed swift Iris heard, and fleeted forth, and swiftly she devoured the space between. So soon as she came to steep Olympus, the dwelling of the Gods, she called forth Eilithyia from hall to door, and spake winged words, even all that the Goddesses of Olympian mansions had bidden her. Thereby she won the heart in Eilithyia’s breast, and forth they fared, like timid wild doves in their going.

Even when Eilithyia, the helper in sore travailing, set foot in Delos, then labour took hold on Leto, and a passion to bring to the birth. Around a palm tree she cast her arms, and set her knees on the soft meadow, while earth beneath smiled, and forth leaped the babe to light, and all the Goddesses raised a cry. Then, great Phœbus, the Goddesses washed thee in fair water, holy and purely, and wound thee in white swaddling bands, delicate, new woven, with a golden girdle round thee. Nor did his mother suckle Apollo the golden-sworded, but Themis with immortal hands first touched his lips with nectar and sweet ambrosia, while Leto rejoiced, in that she had borne her strong son, the bearer of the bow.

Then Phœbus, as soon as thou hadst tasted the food of Paradise, the golden bands were not proof against thy pantings, nor bonds could bind thee, but all their ends were loosened. Straightway among the Goddesses spoke Phœbus Apollo: “Mine be the dear lyre and bended bow, and I will utter to men the unerring counsel of Zeus.”